How do Negative Keywords Work?

Q. What are negative keywords in Google AdWords and how do they work?

A. An example is probably the best way of explaining negative keywords in AdWords. Let’s pretend you’re a florist who specialises in bridal bouquets, but does not do funeral flower arrangements, and you want to advertise under the keyword ‘flowers.’ You could add keywords like ‘funeral’, ‘bereavement’ and ‘memorial’ to your negative list, and someone searching for ‘funeral flowers’ would not see your ad.

As you can use negative keywords on both an ad group and a campaign level, they can work as a useful tool to ensure the person searching sees the correct AdWords ad with your preferred ad copy.

For instance if you sell mobile phones, you may have an ad group based on ‘iPhone’ and an ad group based ‘Nokia.’ To ensure Nokia ads do not come up when someone is searching ‘iPhone’, you could use Nokia as a negative keyword in the iPhone ad group.

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